Some people don’t know it but the filmmakers who made the famous midnight movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” also made a sequel to that film and the sequel is called “Shock Treatment.” The two main stars didn’t come back, but the filmmakers got much better actors/singers and in many ways the second film is really better than the first. But the popularity of the “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was more about pop culture, a strange instant in time, I think, than the film itself. Regardless of how good the sequel was, the kind of long fifteen minutes of fame that the “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” achieved couldn’t be duplicated and nobody much went to see the sequel and, like I said, many people don’t even know a sequel exists.

I think about this a lot because every now and then when I start to jot down lyrics for a song for a little stop-motion video, I catch myself and realize I was just re-stating one or another of the songs from “Shock Treatment.” And I get kind of depressed because I always end up thinking something like, “The film ‘Shock Treatment’ pretty much said almost everything that can be said about the modern world and I’m so in awe of how it did it that I find myself subconsciously recycling its content but the film was so unsuccessful that most people don’t even know it exists so what chance do I have?”

And as if that doesn’t make me depressed enough, yesterday when I was making up my blog index for 2012 I went back and checked the links for the last quarter and I looked in on the post Romanticized Portraits that contains the quote from Kipling’s “The Light That Failed.”

So then I was thinking, “That’s a Kipling book that many people don’t even know exists and if Kipling can have an amazing novel like that fade into obscurity what chance do I have?”

So I’ve started the year kind of depressed.

Sorry.

I’ll get back in gear. I’ve got a couple of ideas for stop-motion videos I want to get to. And I’ve got lots of other projects in progress, but everything is moving slowly. And this is all I have for today. Not a good way to start the year, I know.

Ultimately I don’t think it matters, really, about how popular something is or isn’t. I’m a big fan of the British scientist Rupert Sheldrake. I strongly suspect the whole morphic resonance business has some kind of odd truth to it. So it doesn’t matter if somebody does a cool thing and nobody ever knows about it. I strongly suspect—in some way, perhaps as Sheldrake defines it, perhaps in some other way—the universe itself has memory, or something like memory. And what we do gets remembered. Somewhere. Somehow.

I’m guessing that the fabric of the universe
whatever the fabric of the universe is
vibrates along with the vibrations of a song
wherever a song is played at home in a bar
or through a speaker system in a store or car.

I’m guessing that a song whatever a song is
is a private matter between a musician
and the universe of planets stars galaxies
although it’s fun for the rest of us to listen
before stars vanish as morning brings a mist in.